End Girl Hate – Spread Girl Love Instead

Girl hate is a kind of rivalry taught at a young age, but we can work towards our goals and support each other at the same time. Viva Girl Love.

As a gender we rarely talk enough about how we can sometimes greatly mistreat other women.

In Australia, high school is from year seven to year twelve and for me, that was six years under the heel of a clique/squad/murder of mean girls. Now that I’m in university I’ve thankfully found friendship, but I still witness everyday girl hate on the internet and in real life.

What is girl hate?

I guess we can identify girl hate as a very specific type of bullying, mostly pushing others down to climb on top of them for that drug-like feeling of superiority. Here are just a few typical examples:

• Calling another girl a ‘sl*t’ because she is dating the person you like or wearing a skirt you feel wouldn’t look as good on you.
• Spreading rumours about other women to better your own position in your social group or the workplace
• Claiming a certain girl is a bad feminist for being a stay at home mother
• Claiming a working mother is selfish for not spending 100% of her time with her children.

Most of these seem to revolve around envy. It seems as if girls have been taught to instantly dislike another girl for the most arbitrary, jealousy-related reasons. And the key word here is ‘taught’. The patriarchal systems teaches girls to be in constant competition with each other, but we can be sisters, not rivals. This is the 21st century, and we don’t need to fight for male attention. We can support each other’s ambitions and accept each other’s choices while making our own choices, and furthering our own goals.

We all have insecurities and we all have methods to deal with them, but TEARING DOWN SOMEONE ELSE IS NOT A WAY TO INCREASE YOUR OWN SELF-ESTEEM.

You don’t have to like every woman you meet – it’s how you handle your emotions that matters. If there’s a female celebrity you’re not a huge personal fan of, you don’t have to fill their social feed with hate comments or snake emojis. Being competitive (or even just not in a good mood) isn’t girl hate, either. It’s good to have ambitions, and there’s no law that says you need to act sociable when you’re not feeling it. Again, it’s all about how you react and how you treat other people.

We can work to eliminate girl hate together

Why don’t we work together to achieve great things? Along with girl hate, I see so much fantastic girl love. I see women encouraging each other to work hard and then congratulating each other when they do. This is so inspiring to me as a young woman. This kind of behaviour online and in the physical world will make an impression on young girls to do the same and hopefully put an end to girl on girl hate.

Also, feel free to check out @SpreadGirlLove on twitter. Started by my one of my personal heroes, Lilly Singh, it is a campaign to stop girl hate and spread Girl Love.

‘End Girl Hate’ Illustration: France Corbel